More than two decades ago, doctors told my mother, Barb Barnes, that she needed open-heart surgery. While the news was difficult to hear, it wasn't shocking. She'd gone from running up and down mountains to barely being able to walk up the stairs without feeling winded.
The surgery was scheduled for the summer of 2005. In the months leading up to the surgery, my mom did her best to emotionally and logistically prepare us for the procedure. But she was a single mom, and I was her only child, and the thought of what would happen to me if things didn't go well paralyzed her.
"I had all the faith in the world and really loved the surgeon and the staff and the team, [but] I was terrified out of my mind. I mean, it was open-heart surgery," she told me recently.
The operation was scheduled in a city a few hours away from where we lived. The evening before, we checked into a budget hotel, ordered pizza, and watched a movie. I remember clinging to her all night, terrified that it would be the last night we'd ever spend together.
In the early hours of the morning, long before sunrise, she got me up and tucked me into bed in the room next door where a relative was staying.
When I asked my mom how she felt after dropping me off, she said she felt that'd she'd done everything she could to prepare me. Yet she also felt irreconcilably guilty that she couldn't do more to quell my fears.
Later that afternoon, in a waiting room at the hospital, her surgeon came in with news. Everything had gone well, even better than they expected. My mom began to feel the benefits of the surgery as soon as the anesthesia wore off.
"I actually felt better from the time I woke up as far as energy and breathing were concerned," she said.
Unsurprisingly, my mom was in a lot of pain. The operation required surgeons to split her sternum and open her ribcage to access her heart, an image that came to mind every time she took a painful breath in or braced to sneeze. So, when a nurse told her it was time to start tapering her opioids, it felt impossible to imagine going without pain medication.
"I remember being filled with terror. It just came from my feet all the way to my face. And so I declined tapering and kept asking for the opioids."
Within a day of rejecting the medication decrease, a nurse came to my mom's room, closed the door behind her, and sat next to her bed.
"[She] asked if she could take my hand, and she said, 'I need to talk to you about pain management, and some things I'm worried about for you,'" my mom recalled.
The nurse told her that she had just returned to work after attending a rehabilitation program to treat an opioid addiction. Like my mom, she had been prescribed the medication for pain, but had eventually developed a dependence.
"She looked me right in the eye and in the most authentic, vulnerable way, said, 'I really don't want that to happen to you. I know that you're really frightened, and I think it's possible, Barb, that you are confusing pain with fear.'"
My mom remembers tearing up, realizing that the nurse was right. While she was in immense physical discomfort, she had been mistaking her fear of being disabled by the pain for the pain itself. Holding the nurse's hand, she agreed to start tapering off the medication.
"She said that she would be with me every step of the way, with a pain plan that if . . . the pain came back, whether she was on duty or not, they could call her and she would help me work through it."
From that moment on, my mom's relationship to pain shifted.
"I started experiencing the pain as a strong sensation, instead of a life-threatening [one] that I needed to get rid of through opioids," she remembered.
My mother went on to have multiple medical procedures, most of which usually meant she'd have to endure some amount of pain. But her interaction with the nurse stuck with her. She'd never felt so cared for by another human being.
"She was willing to be right shoulder to shoulder with me, and she really didn't want me to go down the road," she said.
"I don't know where I would be, honestly, without her having done that. I'm pretty sure I would not be where I am today, with a terrific relationship with my daughter, terrific relationships with my friends, independent and able to help others. It's truly because she did that. And she always will be my unsung hero, and not just when I'm in pain."
My Unsung Hero is also a podcast — new episodes are released every Tuesday. To share the story of your unsung hero with the Hidden Brain team, record a voice memo on your phone and send it to myunsunghero@hiddenbrain.org.
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